Dolphin Captivity 69
In a holding tank at the Seoul Zoo, Taesan (foreground) and Boksoon learn
to eat live fish again. They’re scheduled to be released off Jeju Island this
summer. If all goes well, they’ll rejoin Chunsam in their native group.
clock and can tell exactly when they are going
to get fed. We have to turn that around, because
we know that in the wild they will eat more one
day than another.”
Foster also wanted to wake up their highly
capable dolphin brains. He dropped into the pen
things they might not have seen for years, like
an octopus or a jellyfish or a crab. He cut holes
along the length of a PVC tube, stuffed it full of
dead fish, and then plunked it into the water.
Tom and Misha had to figure out how to ma-
nipulate the tube so that the fish would pop out
of the holes. “In captivity we train the animals
not to think on their own, to shut down their
brains and do what we ask them to do,” Foster
explains. “ What we are trying to do when we re-
lease them into the wild is get them off autopilot
and thinking again.”
The feeder tube had two other benefits. It
floated about five feet below the surface, so Tom
and Misha were reminded that food is found
underwater. It also helped disassociate humans
from the provision of food. “ We had to get them
to understand that fish doesn’t only come from
a silver bucket and a person,” says Amy Souster,
a young marine mammal trainer who was draft-
ed into the project by Foster.
Getting Tom and Misha ready was a step-by-
step process that continued through the spring
of 2011, with up to 20 learning sessions a day. By
the time the hot summer months approached,
Foster was hopeful that Tom and Misha would
be ready to swim free in early fall. But in the
summer heat, with the bay’s temperature climb-
ing to a dolphin-stressing 80 degrees or more,
Tom and Misha lost their appetites and were
hit by a virulent blood infection that was bare-
ly staved off by emergency tube feeding and a
heavy dose of antibiotics. “That almost certainly
would have killed them within a few days,” John
Knight, Born Free’s consulting vet, recalls. “It
was a very close call indeed.” Tom and Misha
didn’t have a close bond and mostly tolerated
each other. But Souster was moved to see Mi-
sha trying to care for Tom, pushing him to the
surface to help him breathe when he sank to
the bottom of the pen and taking him fish in an
attempt to get him to eat.
To make matters worse, by the end of the
summer the villagers in Karaca had made
JEAN CHUNG